by Jon McGoran
Mom was pretty freaked out when I got home-relieved to see me, furious at me, and flustered by all the reporters and cops and lawyers waiting to speak with me. Yet again.
I talked to some, and we shooed away the rest. By the time everyone cleared out that night, she didn’t have the energy to be upset with me. Physically, I was fine. And as it turned out, I hadn’t actually missed any school while I was gone. The storm that tore through Centre Hollow also hit Philadelphia pretty hard, so we actually had a snow day.
But I did take a couple more days off after I got home. I was tired and still recovering, and really, I didn’t want to waste the hypothermia excuse, complete with doctor’s note from our family physician.
That’s not to say Mom and I didn’t have it out—we did. Many times.
She would usually start out by saying something like, “It shouldn’t have to be a seventeen-year-old girl doing all this,” sounding only slightly less annoying than Kevin. And I would reply, “Yeah, you’re right, it shouldn’t have to be, but what are you supposed to do when no one else is doing anything about it?”
Then we’d go back and forth with her talking about schoolwork and college and my safety and the importance of keeping in touch, and me talking about all the messed-up stuff in the world, and eventually she’d hug me and tell me how I got all that from my father’s side of the family, and that she was proud of me. And I’d apologize—not because I was sorry for what I’d done, but because I really was sorry that I had hurt her or scared her. Then, before long, one of us would inevitably say something that brought it all up again, and we’d go through the whole conversation once more.
Who knows, maybe on some level it was therapeutic.
On the third day of my convalescence, the FBI came to talk to me. Luckily, DeWitt was there, too. I found out later from Claudia that they questioned her as well, but she had one of her parents’ lawyers present.
There were two different teams, or rather, a lone agent to ask me about the horrible things that Charlesford had been doing at OmniCare Gellersville, and an entire team to ask about something else.
“What do you know about CLAD?” the lead investigator asked. Her name was Special Agent Ralphs, and she looked at me with a stare that she obviously thought was serious and penetrating. She seemed like a bit too much of a badass, like maybe she’d watched too many old action movies.
“CLAD?” We were sitting at my dining room table: me, my mom, DeWitt, Ralphs, and her team of two other agents who didn’t even introduce themselves. My mom had made us all hot chocolate.
“The terrorist group Chimera Liberation and Defense.”
“Just what I’ve heard on the news. I heard they’d claimed responsibility for those H4H bombings.”
“That’s right. Do you know anyone involved with them?”
My mom and DeWitt both looked alarmed until I said, “No! Of course not.”
“What was CLAD’s involvement in the destruction of OmniCare Gellersville?”
I snorted. “None. The place went down because the people running it built it on an unstable mine, so they could use chimeras as forced labor, to—”
Ralphs held up a hand to stop me. “My colleague is investigating those allegations. You can tell all that to him in a minute. But you’re saying unequivocally that CLAD had nothing to do with destroying that hospital?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you are not involved with CLAD in any way?”
“Absolutely not. Why do you even keep asking that?”
“Because they’ve been involved in a number of serious incidents and they are a top priority. And because we’ve intercepted communications between CLAD members that included mentions of you. By name.”
I snorted, reflexively, because it was so ridiculous. “What?”
Instead of repeating herself, she sat back and slowly nodded. My mom looked alarmed again. As Ralphs’s words sank in, I may have looked alarmed, too. I was still kind of freaked out that apparently Wells and his people had been following me. And Chimerica had been, too, for that matter.
Ralph’s leaned forward again. “Ms. Corcoran, what do you know about the terrorist group Chimerica?”
I think she expected that to throw me, but she was finally asking a question I’d kind of been expecting.
I smiled. “Everybody says Chimerica isn’t real.”
Her already cocked eyebrow moved even higher, and she stared at me, waiting for me to crack.
“Okay,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “I guess that’s all we have for now.” She put her business card on the table.
When they left, the next agent, O’Dowd, came in and asked the more relevant and important questions, about Charlesford and OmniCare and Wells. I told him everything I knew, and he took his time, asked insightful questions, and made sure he thoroughly understood all of what I was telling him. I glossed over any references to Chimerica, and said there were some sympathetic nonchimeras who had helped, whose identities I didn’t know and whose descriptions I could only give in the vaguest terms.
He was not a badass at all. He seemed like a good guy, smart and sincere, like he understood the gravity of this, took it seriously as the horrific crime that it was.
Doctor Reivik, whom I’d last seen slung over Rex’s shoulder, was cooperating fully in exchange for reduced charges. She had told O’Dowd plenty, but he knew and I knew that the cards were stacked against him. Charlesford was gone. Within days of his disappearance, there was a sighting in Belize and one in Norway, less than twelve hours apart. After that, nothing.
Howard Wells was undeniably implicated, this time more directly than in Pitman. He was a major shareholder in OmniCare, and Wellplant Corporation was the sole customer of OmniCare’s yttrium extraction subsidiary. There was a lot of speculation that Wells had been so desperate for yttrium, he had moved ahead with the OmniCare plan even though GHA wasn’t settled law. But there was no direct evidence tying him to the SPLINTR operation, or at least not enough to charge him.
That didn’t mean he got off scot-free.
Wellplant was in trouble. Not only had the company lost its supplier of yttrium, meaning thousands of orders were going unfilled and thousands of buyers were mad as hell and filing lawsuits, but it also came out that there had been growing stories about malfunctions in the new Wellplant models that had already shipped. A recall was even imposed, which Wells was fighting in court. Oddly enough, he was joined in the suit blocking the recall by thousands of Wellplant wearers who didn’t want to give up their Wellplants, and didn’t want them altered in any way—which I sort of understood. I’d probably be reluctant to have something yanked out of my head, too. But maybe even stranger was that, while new orders for Wellplants plummeted, orders for upgrades from existing users were stronger than ever, even with the recall.
And while Wells had so far escaped criminal prosecution, there was a huge civil suit in the works, filed by E4E on behalf of those who had been imprisoned in the mines, and the families of those who had died down there. It was complicated by the fact that, under GHA, it wasn’t clear if chimeras had the right to sue, but the burden of proof was much lower in civil court than in criminal court. Wells might have escaped prosecution, but he could stand to lose billions, even trillions, if the suit was allowed to proceed.
Rex kept me posted on the progress in Centre Hollow. Apparently, as happy as everyone was to be out of the mines, there was some grumbling at first about trading life in one pit for life in another. The basement in Centre Hollow wasn’t the easiest place to exist. But the storm left behind calm, clear weather, and as soon as the winds fully died down, the gases seeped up through the cracks in the rock again, filling the hollow. Within a couple of days, the people there had the run of pretty much the entire town, such as it was.
Doc set up a tent for Devon and controlled the atmosphere, a mix of mine gas and fresh air, tweaking it every day with a little more air and a little less mine gas. At the end of ten days, Devon was
breathing plain air, and his lungs had cleared up completely.
Based on that success, over the next several weeks Doc set up a series of tiny tent clinics, from the middle of town to the outskirts, and as each of the chimeras from the mine fell ill, he put them in the first clinic and cared for them, moving them from one clinic to the next, carefully controlling what they were breathing, until their lungs were clear and they were breathing fresh air. In light of Doc’s legal troubles, everyone in Centre Hollow made sure to keep the whole thing quiet. Over the next three months, one by one, every single one of them got sick, and then got better, until there were none, and Centre Hollow went back to being a ghost town.
Rex and I went through some acclimation of our own, getting used to the luxury of being around each other a lot. We got used to that part pretty quick. But we also had some work to do.
It might seem a little overly analytical to say you have to work on a relationship when you’re seventeen. It seems more of a thing you do when you’ve been married ten years.
But we’d had some issues before everything went down with OmniCare. Issues with secrecy. It didn’t bother me as much now—in part because there were fewer secrets—but still, I wanted our own air cleared, so to speak.
One night, about a month after we got back from Centre Hollow, we were at Rex’s apartment. We’d been seeing each other almost every day at that point, and on this one night, we had just come back from dinner at my house, with my mom and Kevin and Trudy. It wasn’t the first time Rex had been over, but it was the first time it hadn’t been excruciatingly awkward.
Sure, Kevin-being Kevin-had felt the need to share with everyone his Rex impersonation for the thousandth time. But Rex responded with a dead-on Kevin. I didn’t know there was such a thing, because Kevin was so boring and nondescript, but Rex nailed it with a “Yo, doofus, stop hogging the potatoes,” or something like that. For the next ten minutes the two of them stayed in character while Mom, Trudy, and I just about died laughing.
It felt different after that. A new level of…well, not normal. I didn’t even want normal. But healthy and real.
Maybe it was because of that, or maybe in spite of it, that I wanted more than ever to have an honest conversation about things.
We were sitting on his sofa, exactly where I wanted to be, with his arm around me and my fingers intertwined with his.
“You know,” I said, “I don’t condone CLAD or any of their actions….”
“But?” Rex asked.
“But it’s kinda nice not having that H4H logo staring back every time you look out the window.”
“I’m just glad no one was hurt.”
“Me, too,” I said quickly. “I just—”
“I know.”
He smiled and looked at his lap for several long seconds. It was great having him right next to me, but all day, it had seemed like a part of him was far, far away.
“What’s on your mind?” I said, looking up at him.
He didn’t meet my eyes. “Nothing.”
“Okay,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Now that I’ve been to Lonely Island, I think I kind of get it more now, Chimerica and what it’s about. And I know there’re things Martin couldn’t tell me, that you can’t tell me, about what Chimerica is up to or who is in charge and everything. Like I said, I understand. But why don’t we try this: if there are things you can’t talk about that are bothering you, you can still talk to me about the fact they’re bothering you, even if you can’t tell me what they are. We can at least do that, right? And try to stay a little more in tune with each other?”
I expected him to say “I know” or “Okay,” and then we’d move on. And I was ready to move on.
But instead, Rex crossed his arms and sat there for a moment, looking thoughtful. Then he said, “Sometimes there are things I want to tell you, but I don’t because I don’t want to dump it on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Keeping secrets is hard. For me, at least. It’s a burden. It sucks. And maybe there’s stuff I do want to tell you, but I don’t want to weigh you down with it, because it’s a secret and then you’ll have to deal with it and you won’t be able to tell anybody.”
“Rex,” I said, patting his cheek, maybe a little condescendingly, maybe because I thought he was being a little condescending. “I’m not a little kid. I can keep a secret. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure I can handle it. And you’ll probably feel better when you get it off your chest.”
He stared at me for a long moment, thinking, then he said, “Okay, well…you remember before OmniCare, when you were asking who was in charge of Chimerica?”
“Yeah?”
He paused again, staring and thinking. I felt bad for him that he was grappling so hard with this, and I was about to tell him, Look, ¡fit’s that big a secret, maybe you should just keep it to yourself.
Then he blurted out, “It’s your aunt. That’s who’s running Chimerica. She’s the one who started it and conceived of it….She’s behind everything.”
I rolled my eyes, and let out a sigh. We’d had a lot of fun at dinner, but I was trying to be serious here. Then again, it was a pretty funny thought. “That’s hilarious, Rex. My Aunt Trudy is the head of Chimerica. Haha. Thanks—I needed that.”
“No, Jimi, not Trudy,” he said, his voice earnest. “Your Aunt Dymphna. She’s the head of Chimerica. Dymphna Corcoran.”
“Aunt Dymphna?” I felt my eyes widen in shock. Aunt Dymphna, whom I’d basically just found out about after not knowing about her for my entire life?
“Yeah, it’s crazy, right? I honestly don’t know much about how she runs things, but everyone says she’s great. And she’s totally brilliant. Turns out she practically invented the whole splicing procedure.”
I was stunned. Rex’s voice seemed so far away, it felt like it was taking several long seconds for his words to even start sinking in.
What did this mean? How could this be true? So many things suddenly made sense, and so many more things suddenly didn’t. I wanted to run home and interrogate my mother, my Aunt Trudy, demand they tell me what they knew about this.
But I couldn’t.
Because it was a secret.
I turned to look at Rex, my jaw slack as the implications washed over me.
His head was back and his eyes closed. His shoulders looked relaxed. He let out a long sigh and slowly grinned as he put his arm back around my shoulders. “Wow,” he said. “That was really weighing on me. But you know what? You’re right—I do feel a lot better now that I’ve shared it with you.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people I’d like to thank for their help, their enthusiasm, and their support, who have championed Spliced, and whose wisdom informed Splintered. First off, in all things, is my wife Elizabeth, who is essential to my writing, and also to my being. As always, I’m grateful to Stacia Decker: super agent, brilliant creative partner, and dear friend. I’m also grateful for the insights, the commitment, and the friendship of my amazing editor, Kelly Loughman, as well as the entire team at Holiday House.
Spliced was my first young adult novel, and since its release, I’ve learned a lot about YA (and how much I hadn’t known about it previously) and a lot about the YA community (and how wise, welcoming, and wonderful the people in it are). When Spliced came out, I felt like an absolute newbie in the world of young adult fiction. And while I still feel like one now, I’m not anymore, really, thanks to all that I’ve learned from so many authors, bloggers, teachers, librarians, and of course, YA readers, both teen and adult.
I’d particularly like to thank the amazing Laurie Halse Anderson, who has been a gracious and invaluable source of wisdom and support, as has my friend and champion Eric Smith—author, agent, and many-other-book-related-things extraordinaire. I’d also like to thank Alex London and Katherine Locke and the wonderful folks I’ve met at Low Groggery, plus all the people I’ve met at KidLitCon, Rochester Teen Book Festival, ABC Children’s Institu
te, NCTE, ALA, PLA, and PaLA.
A lot of people helped with my research into the science behind this book, including petroleum and chemical industry expert Dan Lundeen; Veronica Coptis, from the Center for Coalfield Justice; and Amy R. Sapkota, PhD, MPH, from the University of Maryland School of Public Health. A lot of others provided critical support for the writing. I’d like to thank my pals in the Philadelphia Liars Club, especially my cohosts on the Liars Club Oddcast—Merry Jones, Keith Strunk, Greg Frost, and Kelly Simmons, whose wisdom I absorb each week, even as I pepper them with stupid jokes.
The response to Spliced has been tremendous, and tremendously gratifying. I have thoroughly enjoyed visits to schools and libraries, teen writing groups and book groups, and Skype visits around the country. I look forward to doing more, and I thank those librarians and teachers who have invited me into their classroom, and who have championed my books. Special thanks to librarians Cheri Crowe, Tracee Yawger, and Dena Heilik for all their support.
The relationships that I’ve forged haven’t been limited to the world outside my books. One of the great joys of writing is the people you meet, including the ones on the page. I had a blast writing Spliced, and getting to know the characters in it, and Splintered has been no different. So, to the characters who have come to mean so much to me, and especially Jimi Corcoran: Thanks for letting me write you, and for living in the pages of my books, and, hopefully, in the hearts and minds of my readers as well as in my own.
Finally, Splintered is a work of fiction, and the struggles of the characters within it are fictional as well, but they are most assuredly based on the realities of many, many people facing many different struggles, people who must fight to be who they are and to live their lives without persecution. I am grateful to them for their bravery and persistence as they lead the efforts to make this world a place where those fights are no longer necessary.